Wednesday, February 13, 2013

TOC - Morning keynotes

TOC is O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The theme this year was "connect/create/create". I'll be posting my notes here as different posts for the different sessions all with the label TOC.


O'Reilly - Tim O’Reilly

Copyright common sense seems to be becoming more common.

Is piracy the new advertising – Forbes

Innovators are in the driver’s seat

At VidCon this year YouTube stars were received like the Beatles. Self published fan phenomenon.

John Green (who co-runs VidCon with his brother Hugh) has 15% of all people who bought the book rating it on GoodReads. GoodReads has 10x the reviews that Amazon has. John and Hank (YouTube star) sold out Carnegie Hall. Cross media stars.

O’Reilly is not just a publisher selling books, but involved in media, like conferences. They are a platform.

The new world is about creating and engaging as a community.

“Discovery is Publishers’ Problem not readers” – loudpoet.com

YouTube became our storehouse of folk knowledge – Atlantic

Work on stuff that matters


Intel - Brian David Johnson

Brian is a futurist (he looks 10-15 years in the future) using social science and ethnographic data to see what it will feel like to be human he is also a SciFi author.

His previous topic for today was How To Change the Future, but then he talked with President Clinton and changed the presentation

Pretty soon we will be able to turn anything into a computer because of the size of components. This changes from "how can we do it" to "what should we do".

SciFi shows us how technology affects people. Steampunk is playing with the past, but all about technology – it is one answer to how technology today affects the past. Just as SciFi tells about a future we want and one we don’t, history (the genre) can do the same thing. 

To change the future, you change the story that people tell themselves about the future.

Narrative, opinions, words matter -- the what it is, the device its on doesn’t matter anymore.


Inkling - Matt Macinnis

10 minute recap of the hour long presentation from Monday.
Amazon forces us into the model of a $10 text file. A step backwards given the benefits that eReader technology could offer (color, interactivity, gestures).

You can relight your pilot light on your furnace from a YouTube video, but if you’re going to build a patio out back you want beautiful, curated content -- in other words you want something from a publisher.

Discoverability is offered via their site and Google searches. It was turned on the middle of December. This drives users to their site and the conversion rate to purchasing the books is respectable (double that of normal adverts). Here are two examples:  “sommelier wine pairing decisions” “backless bench posteour”

(O’Reilly's TOC chair is “bullish” on Inkling)


SPi Global - John Wheeler

Standards and structure are important in eBook production.
Internet traffic to mobile devices will soon surpass that to desktops.

Need to be sure content purchased on one device works on another since a fare percentage of people view two screens at once at that will grow.

Most HTML5 features are EPUB3 features.

ePub3 means eBooks should not substantially lag behind the browser in future


[the section below will be edited later]
Panel: Cory Doctorow, Brian David Johnson, Henry Jenkins

When is something a blog post, when is it print, when is it a film, when is it multimedia?
Spreadable Media is a book by Jenkins about how content spreads trhough media. When asked to cut the book down in size before printing. They took the extra and put it on the web and asked for it to be spread then finished the book discussing that.
You used to have to buy the right book to know how to do something. Now what you need is to know the right keywords.
You can assume as a writer that the reader has a search box at arms length as they read.
The worry of pocket calculators was that kids wouldn’t be able to do long division in their heads – forgetting that adults couldn’t at that time anyways. Now good education assumes a calculator and good literature should assume the search engine in much the same way.
You need to go everywhere to spread the message, both physically (around the world) and with mediums (blogs, devices, print, conferences, etc). Intel Tomorrow Project works this way. Says “yes” to every medium (should we make a blog).
Cory’s Dandelion model
Should call it unauthorized circulation instead of privacy – you loose control but gain cultural currency. It allows for massive circulation beyond what would normally happen (look at jangham style).
With the best rated tv show and movie added together you don’t get close to the number of views of a non-profits web video (40 m vs. 200 m).
Corey “we’re very invested in our reproductive strategy” – realized it with his daughter, but sees it with his creative ideas. Mammals want everything they make to do something great, but a dandelion just wants to spread seed with no worry about the particular seed but to know that every crack in a sidewalk has a dandelion growing out of it. We need to switch our reproductive strategy from mammalian to dandelion. This works now because reproduction is so cheap compared to results. Fluid cheap distribution systems are key to this. This is where YouTube or Facebook monetizing (penny cost in YouTube for checking content, $10 Facebook promotions of posts) is a big problem because it forces you to be more careful and think mammalian instead of being dandelion.
Sub cultures used to require you to go somewhere (hippies to Haight/Ashbury) but now if you want to be a steampunk just go online.
The occult = my firm will tell you how to make your video go viral. The avoidance = shrug on why it went viral.  These are both the wrong attitude. Instead its about setting up the conditions to promote an ecosystem that allows things to go viral.
SciFi is like taking a sample and putting it into a petri dish and seeing what happens. It isolates a factor to examine it.
SciFi with an intent (author has strongly held opinion) and that’s what changes things.



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